Test flight for Adobe's Apollo

Bloggers were buzzing Monday about Adobe Systems' plans to release an "alpha" version of its new Apollo software, designed to allow applications to run both online and offline.

Apollo applications will work just like standard Web apps, but also act like locally installed software, with desktop icons and the ability to automatically reconnect when the computer goes online.

It's one of a set of new technologies aimed at developers of cross-platform rich Internet applications, including Adobe's Flash, Ajax, Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere and OpenLaszlo.

Bloggers welcomed Adobe's entry, and seemed eager to try out the new tool and to see what developers would come up with.

Blog community response:

"I'm particularly excited about Apollo given its advance of the state of web tech... and the best is yet to come (though Finetune gives a taste of where we're starting from). At the same time, I'd prefer a slightly lest costly and more open--but equally intuitive and capable--solution. OpenLaszlo, where y'at?" --FactoryCity

"Microsoft is ahead in workflow and 3D, but Adobe is ahead in ubiquity and cross-platform. Lots of developers like using Macs now, and Microsoft only makes WPF tools for Windows. Also, there's WPF/E (for 'everywhere') but it is a small subset of WPF, so developers might find that to be frustrating and limiting and decide to go with Apollo." --Scobleizer

"Hype around the application product development platform aside, being able to bring in the developers to build apps and than the users to consume those apps will be the long path that Adobe has to work on. There are few smart product being developed or extended to work on Apollo that includes Yourminis's widgets based home page service, and VirtubÂ’s collaboration tool. Still a long way to catch up Java and AJAX apps." --Startup Squad